Co-Founder Charlie Cheever Leaves And Quora Is Curve Jumping

In May this year, Quoraraised $50 million for valuation of $400 million. Two months later, the company announced its plan to move from Pala Alto to a bigger office space in Mountain View. These two major announcements show the Q&A site is gaining kinetic energy.

Since its inception, the site has been in the state of kaizen. It just announced a couple of interesting incremental improvements - Trending Topics and redesigned Topic page. The site is more useful now with its growing diversity and total topics on the site grew from 70,000 to over 250,000 in the past year. Things are blooming at Quora, slowly but surely. Or so it seems.

Quora just announced the departure of co-founder Charlie Cheever (and the news surprised me).

A co-founder leaving a budding startup is never a good sign. It tends to sow the seeds of negative sentiments across its community, employees, and also would-be users.

However, with growth and new investors come a different set of strategic directions, priorities, and dynamics. The accumulation of the shifts nudge Quora to jump the curve, which simplistically means "leaving one stage of development for another....leaving the comfort and familiarity of the old world of conventional wisdom, processes, traditions, leadership styles and products" (Nicholas Imparato and Oren Harari in Jumping The Curve: Innovation and Stratgic Choice in an Age of Transition, 1996). The curve jumping creates discontinuity and oftentimes, open up expectation chasm among the leadership team. The growing pain of a startup.

(Sort-of) Official Statement from Quora on Quora

Quora is known for its many unadulterated stories and unvarnished insights. For the many insights shared on the site, thousands of questions remain unanswered. The many questions surrounding Cheever's departure will most likely remain unanswered on Quora (at least for now). But Stewart Brand once said, information wants to be free. And Quora is today's best tool in the modern web to peel off any shroud of secrecy.

I'm greatly fascinated with the confluence of business strategies, the Internet, and mobile and also, the dynamics of Asian web landscape. I'll be delivering interesting web side stories from Asia here. I have previously co-authored Emergence of The Agile Enteprise: Buildi...